Inventor of email says he didn't see spam coming

Watson. Come here. I need you. To buy some herbal Viagra and to collect millions I have stuck in Nigerian bank account.

It's a good thing the telephone network hasn't been as incredibly abused as the email networks of the world have (well, not quite as badly, anyway). If things had gone as badly for the telephone, it might have stopped telecommunications in its tracks, causing early phone adopters to rip the things out of the walls and go back to messengers bearing little note cards as the only way to communicate over distances.

Ray Tomlinson sent the first email 37 years ago using his own home-grown software (for what it's worth, he doesn't remember the actual message but thinks it might be "qwerty"). In a new interview with the Times Online, Tomlinson says he had no idea what his then-humble technology would bring. Certainly email has brought us a lot of good (I wouldn't have a job without it), but it's also created enough bad that the amount of fraud associated with online scams and email spam is now measured in the billions of dollars each year.

Tomlinson says such problems were unforeseeable back in 1971. "At that time," he says, "the number of people who used e-mail was very small; maybe between 500 to 1,000. So if you were getting spam, you'd know who was sending it. You'd be able to say to them: that's not a good thing to do." It wasn't until the possibility of sending email anonymously emerged that Tomlinson, or anyone else for that matter, became aware of how dangerous the technology might become.

But let's not cast the blame on Tomlinson, OK? It took 20 years for the spam problem to really begin in earnest, and it's the companies that built and operated the first mail servers without planning an authentication system (to verify who was actually sending all these messages) that should really be called out as the ones who allowed the spam problem to get as bad as it ultimately has.

As for Tomlinson, he still works in tech but seems relatively insulated from his invention. The number of messages he sends in a day? About 12. Somehow I received twice that number while I was typing this post!

Read more of the interview with Tomlinson along with his thoughts on email's birth and growth by clicking here.